Musings

Institutional Corruption: Rockford Public School District 205 (RPS 205)

My hometown school district at Rockford, IL has a $450 million annual budget for almost 27,000 students. However, our graduating class at Auburn High School was only one third the size of our original freshman class. Even during high school, I had a firm belief that the reason that our school district suffered from many issues such as gun violence, teenage pregnancy, etc. was because we simply did not have the resources available due to the linkage between property tax and school district funding. However, upon looking up our operational costs on the Illinois Interactive Report Card System, I realized a shocking truth: the instructional cost per student at my high school was about $6,249 which is comparable to the $6,974 dedicated to each student at Naperville Central, which is arguably one of the most successful public school districts in Illinois. As a result, I hope to be able to apply the lens of Institutional Corruption to understand the factors that account for our school district’s failure to accomplish its goal as an educational institution.

08/13/2014: My Public Comment at the RPS205 Board Meeting

Quantum Physics for Poets

Want to know something about applications of quantum mechanics? Interested in Quantum Computing and 1-Dimensional Systems? Don’t even know what the heck those are? Are you a poet? If you answered yes to any of the following, check out this painless article I wrote: A Poet’s Introduction to Selected Topics in Quantum Physics